"Don't count too heavily on it," he went on. "I can't imagine dying before having had what I have always wanted, have always sooner or later intended to get. If I come back I shall have it."
Without another word she turned and left him. He watched her walk side by side with Dalrymple out of the area.
IX
There were moments on the voyage, in the training area in Flanders, even at the front, when he was sorry he had tried to take something of Sylvia with him to battle; for, as it was, he had of her nothing whatever except a wish that she should never see him again. There was a deep irony, consequently, in his official relations with her brother, for it was Lambert who saluted him, who addressed him perpetually as "sir," who wanted to know if the major would approve of this, that, or the other. It was grotesque. He wanted to cry aloud against this necessary servility of a man whose sister couldn't abide the inferiority of its object.
And he hated war, its waste, its bad management, its discomforts, its dangers. Was it really true he had involved himself in this filth because of Sylvia? Then that was funny. By gad, he would see her again! But he watched his chances dwindle.
While the battalion was in reserve in Lorraine Lambert and he ran into Dalrymple at the officers' club beneath division headquarters in Baccarat. George saw him first.
"The intrepid warrior takes his ease," he muttered.
Dalrymple left three staff men he was with and hurried across the room.
"New York must be a lonesome place," he said. "Everybody here. Had a letter from Sylvia, Lambert."
Why should she write to him? Far from women's eyes he was back at it. One of the staff men, in fact, wandered over and whispered to George.